Meru -What's my refresh options?

[abrigham]

I have been a long standing Meru customer for many years, their Virtual Cell technology beats any other competitor in Education.

 

Now they have been Fortinet and our kit is 5 years old, what now?

 

Well I am really impressed with how Fortinet have imbedded their security expertise with the acquired tech. It's natural to stay with them for the trade in price.

 

Looking at wireless lan controller, universal APs and wireless manager.

[m25man]

I their Virtual Cell technology beats any other competitor in Education.

 

Plenty on here will argue that statement however,

 

We have seen the acquisition and merger of several big names in the WiFi arena into networking and security and as BYOD becomes the norm and SDN takes over from hardware based systems a battle of giants is getting underway.

 

HP Aruba, Meru Fortinet, Xirrus and Riverbed, Ruckus and Arris, Extreme took Zebra and Avaya...

 

The wireless network vendors of today are nothing like they were just 2 years ago.

 

The entire landscape has changed and convergence is #1 on the menu.

 

Wireless wars are still unfolding and SCB is not really winning any great following as far as I can see.

 

Even Ubiquiti have chosen to diversify into wearable technology,

What ever next!

 

The Gigabit uplink is the next major hurdle, in order to take full advantage of the 1.7 Gb MUMIMO even Netgear are offering multi gig ports and LACP trunking on their latest AP's to address these issues.

 

Interesting times ahead that's for sure.

[njc235]

Hi Adam

 

There are a number of trade-up/upgrade options available through Fortinet partners. I presume you have something like AP320 APs and an MC3200 controller, in which case you're probably looking at an AC or AC wave 2 solution. I suggest contacting Fortinet UK who will put you in touch with a reputable partner.

[Net-Ctrl]

Great opportunity to test what's available on the market right now. Could be worth getting some trial kit from other manufacturers and see what works best in your environment. A lot of manufacturers are running trade-in promos. Ruckus also have one for all wireless solutions, be it Ruckus or other kit. Most resellers will also run some FOC predictive surveys for you so you can get their take on your deployment as well. If something like this is of interest we can do all the above for Ruckus.

[AlanD]

I would definitely advise taking a good look at ubiquity kit. Lower cost, and no on going annual charges...and a perfectly useable management console for free. Are they as good as the top stuff? possibly not, but you’ll need a stop watch to tell the difference. And because you can afford more of them you will be able to position them more liberally so that the cover you get operates at a higher bandwidth.

 

The single channel virtual cell architecture was great when you had a localised , but dense deployments of a class of laptops but when you have several classrooms using laptops and/or tablets it’s not going to deliver the same bandwidth as a range of 40 or 80 MHz channels. And I don’t think the current chips sets allow the virtual cloning of Mac addresses to deliver the virtual cell without loss of packets so meru’s inovative technology doesn’t produce the same gains with ac chip sets.

 

Don’t expect suppliers to come rushing to sell you ubiquity kit, because they make much less margin compared to selling you the Meru/meraki/Cisco/ruckus/aerohive stuff.